Ret. SB Judge John Pacheco on law and politics

The following is a transcript of retired San Bernardino Superior Judge John Pacheco’s short video for the Judicial Fairness Coalition. It is published with his permission. He made this video in response to the question, “What role does politics play in the courtroom and how do politics impact a judge’s decision?”

It’s important that you understand that politics is not to be any type of consideration. Who you are, and what your connections are, how much money you have, or how much money you don’t have, should not, and are not the basis for a judge’s decision. The impact of the ultimate result on one political party or another, which I will talk about further, is not the basis of judicial decision making. We have to keep the politics out of our judicial decision-making. When people elect legislators and executive branch officers, they do elect representatives to either put the law in motion such as what an executive branch would do, or to create a law, which is what a legislative branch would do. But when people elect judges, they elect people who commit to reviewing and applying the law fairly and evenly, based on how the law is written and the facts of each case, as opposed to a judge’s personal and political preferences. In a traditional way, we think of politics as we are used to in seeing it exercised in the creation and enforcement of law. The intersection of law and politics is not in this courtroom, or in any courtroom. However, that is not to say that we never have a case involving an election or a controversial matter. Those things do pop up. But overall, politics is not in a courtroom.